Why is the current teenage generation referred to as 'Generation X'?

Answer 1

Generation X usually refers to people born roughly between 1966 and 1980, give or take a few years on either end. (Some consider Generation X to begin a bit later than 1966 and sometimes end before 1980--say, by 1977 or so.) It also may refer to those whose "teen years" included all or part of the 1980s and/or early 1990s. The author Douglas Coupland coined the term in his first novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, in 1991. At the time of this writing, the youngest members of Generation X are in their mid- to late 30s, and the oldest members would be 50 or approaching that age.

A note about "generations": The division of people by historians into generations based on year of birth seems to be based on the assumption that they shared certain types of experiences in common in their childhood and teens. One of the key difficulties with this is often the huge gap between people born early in each generation and those born towards the end. For example, it's sometimes said that the Baby Boom generation (born 1946-1965) 'became hippies'! This applied to some born in the 1940s (and possibly early 1950s) but not to those born in the early 1960s, for example.

The current teenage generation (as of this writing) is called the Millennials (also known as Generation Y, although Millennials seems to be the term that has stuck). Researchers are currently calling Millennials those that were born in the early 1980s through the early 2000s.

Generation Z (so it is called now, for lack of another term) refers to those born roughly from the mid-2000s (say, 2005) to the present.